Baseline Bob Show Episode 5 Visit to Product Development

Baseline Bob Show Episode 5 Visit to Product Development

By Hannah Dvoryanin

 

He has heel spurs, flat feet and an ingrown toenail

He has common forms of lordosis and kypho scoliosis of the spine due to poor posture, sitting, and sleeping habits.

He has astigmatism, and night blindness, has trouble seeing at dusk and dawn, and high contrast light sometimes gives him headaches.

He has an atrophied undescended testicle.

He has psoriasis, eczema, and gets chronic hives.

Beans, lentils, dairy products, onions, garlic, spring onions, leeks, turnips, swedes, radishes, sweet potatoes, potatoes, cashews, Jerusalem artichokes, oats, wheat, yeast in breads, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts and cruciferous vegetables makes him flatulent.

He is susceptible to flatus expulsion under high altitude and other low air pressure conditions.

 

Who would possibly live like this?

 

That’s right kids….IT’S BASELINE BOB!

 

The Imperial Holonet’s favourite picaresque morality fable celebrity, BASELINE BOB!

 

<Cue the Baseline Bob Theme Song>

(Kids, it’s mandatory to sing along)

 

It’s Not Your Show,

It’s The Baseline Bob Show,

And Not Your Show,

Which is why it’s called

The Baseline Bob Show,

And NOT called Your Show.

Because It's

….The….

….Baseline….

….Bob….

….Showwwwwww….

 

<Cue pre-recorded studio audience applause with children cheering>

 

BARITONE VOICEOVER MAN: "HEY KIDS! Did you know that Baseline Bob has a job? That’s right, he needs more than just the pie we give him. Today, we get to see Baseline Bob at work. Baseline Bob works as a coder. Coders are a kind of pseudo semi-sentient organic being that converts coffee into executable computer programming code, they fix problems you didn’t know you had in ways that you don’t understand."

 

As Baseline Bob leaves his home, he checks his household hints app:

1. Turn off the shower before you leave home to conserve water.

2. Extinguish fires in your house and the smoke detector batteries can last for months.

3. To reduce the number of clogged toilets, leave the lid on the upper chamber, and use only the lower bowl.

4. Many windows can be slid open to create a temporary hole without the usual expensive replacement costs and time consuming cleanup.

 

Thought of the day: Why do hot dogs come in packs of 10, hot dog buns in packs of 8, and condoms comes in packs of six?

 

Baseline Bob checked his monitoring of random self-ironic meme trends. Self-ironic meme trends last only 9-10 years, We looking for people to join focus groups for the replacement for after the 'zombies', 'bacon' and 'definition of a sandwich' meme die out.

 

Arriving at the employee entrance, Baseline Bob speaks to Security Guy Steve.

 

Security Guy Steve: How are you?

 

Baseline Bob: I am pleased that I am competently handling this basic social interaction, the conversation.

 

Security Guy Steve: Me, too. Congratulations.

 

Baseline Bob: Thanks.

 

<long pause>

 

Security Guy Steve: It’s falling apart. Quit while you’re ahead.

 

Baseline Bob: Yes. Good idea. See you later.

 

Security Guy Steve: "Sir, there is an alarm coming from your car."

 

Baseline Bob: "What did it sound like."

 

Security Guy Steve: "Brinnnngggg buzz weeeoooeee aaht aahht bloooot BWEEP bip bip BWEEP eeeoooeeeooo NEE-eu NEE-eu ping woop woop beep bleep blip bweee eeeeeee  woo-woo-woo YYYYOOOOoooo."

 

Baseline Bob: "My car alert system goes BRAYNK! BRAYNK! BRAYNK! BRAYNK! Bee-dee-dee-deep! Bee-dee-dee-deep! Booo-weep! Booo-weep! Booo-weep! Dee-deedlee-doo, dee-deedlee-doo, dee-deedlee-doo, not Brinnnngggg buzz weeeoooeee aaht aahht bloooot BWEEP bip bip BWEEP eeeoooeeeooo NEE-eu NEE-eu ping woop woop beep bleep blip bweee eeeeeee  woo-woo-woo YYYYOOOOoooo."

 

Security Guy Steve: "I am pretty sure it was 'Brinnnngggg buzz weeeoooeee aaht aahht bloooot BWEEP bip bip BWEEP eeeoooeeeooo NEE-eu NEE-eu ping woop woop beep bleep blip bweee eeeeeee  woo-woo-woo YYYYOOOOoooo', sir."

 

Baseline Bob: "I would get an alert on my G-P.A.D.D.."

 

Baseline Bob feels around in his pocket for his G-P.A.D.D.

 

Baseline Bob: "Now I understand it, it was BWEEP bip bip BWEEP eeeoooeeeooo NEE-eu NEE-eu ping woop woop beep bleep blip bweee eeeeeee  woo-woo-woo YYYYOOOOoooo Brinnnngggg buzz weeeoooeee aaht aahht bloooot, not 'Brinnnngggg buzz weeeoooeee aaht aahht bloooot BWEEP bip bip BWEEP eeeoooeeeooo NEE-eu NEE-eu ping woop woop beep bleep blip bweee eeeeeee  woo-woo-woo YYYYOOOOoooo'. You caught it in the repeat cycle. It the app sets an alarm to remind me not to forget the device that provides me with 24/7 stream of unqualified opinions, free unvetted scary news stories and random emotional stimuli."

 

Security Guy Steve: "Have a nice day, Sir."

 

Manager Marvin: "Baseline Bob, you’re late."

 

Baseline Bob: "I’m sorry, I had trouble with my backpack. Do I use the backpack with the charger pocket or the other one is waterproof. Should I take one of my backpacks or maybe a messenger bag instead. I wasn’t’ feeling well and had trouble deciding. I received an alert that most people are mildly dehydrated and don’t realize, and that I should drink 6 glasses of water per day. Someone else said 8, another said 10. I spent all day yesterday reading thru every study I could find about whether low grade dehydration is really even a thing. I forgot to eat and drink, I didn’t feel so good, I felt dizzy. Can I have something to drink?"

 

Manager Marvin: "Baseline Bob, if you want to have a career here, you are going to have to take your job seriously. What is your job?"

 

Baseline Bob: "I make tools that make tools that monitor code, which then deploys tools the deploys tools for deploying monitors, for monitoring deployment of tools, for some end use, I think it relates to pornography end users somehow."

 

Manager Marvin: "Hm, we have a directive here from the Interim Assistant to the Acting Undersecretary, that position is going to be defunded and automated."

 

Baseline Bob: "I thought she was the Principal Executive Assistant Administrator for the Assistant Associate Deputy Chief of Staff to the Second Principal Assistant Deputy Underminister."

 

Manager Marvin: "No, that’s her former title, her full title is Assistant Chief of Staff to the Principal Executive Assistant Administrator for the Assistant Associate Deputy Chief of Staff to the Second Principal Assistant Deputy Underminister. The company believes that new layers of management and more managers at each layer will improve accountability and performance. The consensus of the subtle Kremlinology of the nuances of bureaucratic titles, I am pretty sure that this was a promotion for her. "Anyway, Baseline Bob, you’re going to be sacked."

 

Baseline Bob: "Can't you just transfer me?"

 

Manager Marvin: "I don’t know, Baseline Bob, it seems you had a bad sting of luck with your previous positions. What did you do before this?"

 

Baseline Bob: "Failed emoji repurposing. Management thought there might be a market for the 'multiplayer avocado' and 'snake shaming' emoji, if presented correctly."

 

Manager Marvin: "Hm, yes. Candle eating, owl stuffing, hedgehog curling, tinkerball, and merfishing also were not winners."

 

Baseline Bob: "I thought there was hope for tinkerball and merfishing, but there was no budget or time for user data research to find their niche."

 

Manager Marvin: "And before the land of unwanted emoji?"

 

Baseline Bob: "Extreme G-P.A.D.D. security options. If stolen, after ten failed unlock attempts, the G-P.A.D.D. can be remotely, tracked, erased, or detonated. It also played an ear splitting siren until battery is completely drained or removed. Or it does a fake factor reset, then in the background requests dozens of rideshares to the phone location, orders food from every restaurant within the current phone location delivery zone. If the thief logs into facebook, sends vulgar and hostile messages to all of their friend list. It automatically instructs self driving car to drive towards phone location at 5 mph. And takes photo’s of random items at thief’s location and lists them on Craigslist as free."

 

Manager Marvin: "Sounded great, until the Director’s wife tried to borrow the prototype."

 

Baseline Bob: "Let’s see if we can find you another assignment. Let’s look at your coding reviews."

 

<Excerpt>

It’s like you ran OCR on a photo of a scrabble board where javascript reserved words were triple word score.

It’s like you transcribed a naval weather forecast while woodpeckers hammered random shift keys and randomly indented.

It’s like an e e cummings poem using only usernames a website suggestions when the username you want in unavailable.

It’s like the output of a Markov-Bot fed bus schedules from a city where buses frequently crash.

It’s like song lyrics that come after a question mark in the URL.

It’s like a JSON table of model numbers for flashlights with tactical in the name. It’s like you read Turing’s 1936 paper on computing and a page of javascript and guessed at everything in between.

It’s like a 1337-speak translation of a survivalist cult manifesto obsessed with memory allocation.

<End Excerpt>

 

Manager Marvin: "This seems about average, it says here that you can drive a car."

 

Baseline Bob: "Yes, sir. I passed a 20 minute drive test when I was 16 years old while allows me to legally operate a one-ton ambulatory vehicle, propelled with exploding gassified volatile liquids, accelerate it to high speeds that can kill me and others, controlled manually using my hands and feet."

 

"Report to Grandmaster Wally, we're going to attach you to the self driving vehicle project, they had a fata…they had an opening you’d be perfect for."

 

Grandmaster Wally "Stop, before you enter this abode, you must consider that there is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C.

 

Baseline Bob, "But Grandmaster Wally, C is the language in which the very kernel of Unix is implemented!"

 

Grandmaster Wally nodded in solemn agreement, "That is so. Through C language we become as one with the operating system and the machine, reaping matchless performance. Yet, there is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C. Consider this pipeline. Implemented in pure C, would it not span ten thousand lines? How many hours would you require to implement and debug that C program?"

 

Baseline Bob, "Many, but I would not spend time to do that when so many more better tasks."

 

"Correct. Enter. Coder Drones, who better understands the Unix-nature?" Grandmaster Wally asked, "Is it the Unix Adept who writes the ten thousand lines, or this Baseline who, perceiving the emptiness of the task, gains merit by not coding?"

 

Grandmaster Wally bowed, "The Baseline can stay."

Grandmaster Wally went to lunch early.

 

Baseline Bob, "What do I do now?"

 

Intern Ida-No. 23, "Look over the CVE for the latest bugs we’re looking to fix."

 

Baseline Bob, "Can I use the terminal with that nice screensaver?"

 

Intern Ida-No. 23, "No, that’s not a screensaver, we are watching the superbowl at 1/2300 speed so that it will take the whole year to watch. Come back next month, you can watch the commercials. I gotta go. I started the day with many problems, now after many hours of work I have many problems in spreadsheet format."

 

Baseline Bob sits at a different terminal.

 

<Excerpt, CVE Bug List>

Products crash when certain combinations of Bengali and Telegu letter combinations are input.

A timing attack can exploit an as yet misunderstood race condition in garbage collection which will extract a certain amount of bits from a basketball Wikipedia page which results in a rule change allowing dogs to join the team for tournament play.

A flaw in some x86 CPUs allows a root user to de-escalate to normal account privileges.

Certain products spontaneously burst into flames when certain emoji’s with diacritic marks are input into certain applications.

Hackers can execute malicious code in their own machine and no one can stop them.

The product will automatically execute any code printed over a picture of a dog with a saddle and a baby on it.

Turns out the cloud is just other people’s computers.

A flaw in MITRE’s CVE Database allows arbitrary code insertion [~~Click here for cheap Viagra!~~]

<End Excerpt>

 

<Excerpt Product Remote Features>

20 function, burns clean coal, dishwasher safe, 3-G accelerator, solar heated, maximum strength pore cleaner, can zest lemons, automatically administers annual flu vaccine, pre-seasoned and college ruled, old school radium backlighting, sterile packaging, soundproof, can feel pain, 28-factor authentication, non-porous but not waterproof, exclusive subwoofer and dogwhistle, cough activated WebMD feature provides a random diagnosis, seedless, both a bevelled bezel and a bezelled bevel, onboard cloud, 12 phone jacks. Siri, Cortana, Google Now, and Alexa all respond simultaneously.

<End Excerpt>

 

Tech Dude Darnell: "Hey, you, hand me that USB cable."

Tech Dude Darnell: "No, that one carries power, but not data."

Tech Dude Darnell: "No, data but not power."

Tech Dude Darnell: "Too short."

Tech Dude Darnell: "Charges too slowly."

Tech Dude Darnell: "Won’t auto-activate portable charger."

Tech Dude Darnell: "Annoying ferrite lumps."

Tech Dude Darnell: "Heavy and inflexible."

Tech Dude Darnell: "Frayed."

Tech Dude Darnell: "Doesn’t fit thru case."

Tech Dude Darnell: "Needs to be twisted to keep working."

Tech Dude Darnell: "No, weird shape."

Tech Dude Darnell: "No, wrong interface."

Tech Dude Darnell: "Hand me the red one."

 

Physics Phylbin: "Is colour is a mixture of three colours mixed together? Is it a rainbow with colour having a different wavelengths? Colour is unknowable, maybe what I see as red, you see as orange. Maybe it is a mixture of infinite wavelengths filtered thru three eye pigments, depending upon species. Maybe colour is an abstract multidimensional gamut of subjective phenomena filtered thru inconsistently implemented device colour profiles. Maybe it is a hyperdimensional four-sided quantum klein manifold…"

 

Tech Dude Darnell: "You, Baseline, hand me the red USB cable."

 

Customer Concerns Connie: "What if someone paints fake lines on the road or places a lifesized cutout of a pedestrian on the road? Self driving cars would crash.

 

Baseline Bob: "The same thing might happen with a person driving."

 

Customer Concerns Connie: "Hm, we have not factored in the fact that most people are not murderers. It is an underappreciated aspect of transportation safety."

 

Tech Dude Darnell: "That’s not our biggest problem. Self-refueling means we now have empty cars wandering highways at all hours until credit cards are maxed out."

 

Customer Concerns Connie: "But that is self fixing."

 

Tech Dude Darnell: "Yes, The media celebrated us a geniuses when we programmed full highway autonomy, leading to the first live webcast of full trips without input by driver while passengers are having sex. But now the cars are reading other people’s bumper stickers before deciding whether to cut them off. The rev the engine at red lights for self esteem purposes. Some have self esteem issues and are self loathing, some are even capable of complaining about the trolley issues on facebook."

 

Customer Concerns Connie: "It’s like autocorrect. Everyone complained about autocorrect, but then it prevented a nuclear war. These problems are intractable and inevitable, it is just the price we pay for progress. Progress is lovely."

 

Tech Dude Darnell: "Progress is lovely."

 

Baseline Bob: "Progress is lovely."

 

Intern Ida-No. 23: "Progress is lovely."

 

Physics Phylbin: "Progress is lovely."

 

Customer Concerns Connie: "Have Grandmaster Wally sign off on this and we will send it to Simulation Sally to see how many people will die as a result, and how much the payouts will be compared with the costs of retooling."

 

BARITONE VOICEOVER MAN: "HEY KIDS! Wasn’t that fun? By your petty ignorance and self-absorption, you too can cause horrific accidents and ruin the life of millions. Remember Kids, Progress is lovely."

 

The episode brought to you by

Fnord Motor Company's Self Driving Cars

What do you have to lose?

We’ll get you there or we’ll all die trying.